This invention relates to a method and apparatus for enabling interaction between users using two or more client devices with different capabilities and bandwidths.
In a heterogeneous network, different client devices have different capabilities. If a single stream is being viewed by these client devices, either the server must slow down to the rate of the slowest client or one or more clients will lose packets. Either way, the quality of the presentation will suffer.
FIG. 1 shows an example of such a system in the prior art. In this example, we show three clients. A client which can handle high speed data streams 102, a client which can handle medium speed data streams 106, and a client which can handle low speed data streams 104. In this scenario, a media server 108 sends a high speed data stream to the network 110. The media server has no knowledge of the clients 102, 104, 106 who are accepting the data stream, as they are passively 199 integrated with the network 110 as well. The result will be that the client capable of keeping up with the stream 102 will be able to process it successfully. The other two 104, 106 will experience differing levels of degradation ranging from what appears to be noisy or distorted information being presented to the client to complete loss blocks of information.